Youtube Stimulus

To break the silence here on my blog, I decided to show y’all a few things I’ve been up to as of late:

First off, I’m in dire need of a job. And as a filmmaker, that means going to work for somebody and not betting on how easily the job will be to get. Especially since I applied for an internship at Pixar. So I decided to showcase my After Effects abilities by showing a shot in different stages:

And since I need the money bad enough, I’m actually selling books on Amazon right now. Here’s a bit of what I have to offer:

Hope y’all enjoyed this.

Breaking the Rules of Music

When it comes to movies, music and other forms of popular media, a good rule to follow is to keep politics to a minimum. Why? Because nobody likes to go to the movies, shell out ten bucks and be surprised as whatever blockbuster action film or family film or whatever kind of film is your flavor takes a 180 near the climax and starts preaching about how you need to hug trees more, pollute less and lie to you about how war is evil. If you’re in the entertainment business, you limit your audiences if you decide basing your career around your own personal politics. But if you’re going for that, then so be it.

First off, if humor is your flavor, you might want to take a look at the works of the Mike Church Show Band. It’s out to make a point and doesn’t pull any punches. If a politician is too liberal (Even John McCain), they bash them. But their music, as you can see on their Myspace page I’ve linked to, deals with a wide variety of political subjects. There’s even a video tribute on Youtube showcasing one of their better parodies:



Pretty good, huh? Well as it turns out, these guys have been doing music for a while. And their Myspace selection just so happens to be limited after all. Here’s some songs by the Mike Church Band that didn’t quite make the cut there, but still made their way online. Why is that? Because they’re both funny AND blatantly racist at the same time:



How about some musical humor that doesn’t’ qualify as hate speech? Let’s try another artist, Rusty Humphries. This guy still qualifies as politically incorrect, but at the very least he doesn’t used racist terminology like “wetbacks” or “towelheads” as much as he could. Like Mike Church, he’s also a conservative talk show host. But it doesn’t seem like he’s terribly into music. I say this because these parodies date back to 2006:



And if you’re not into humor at all, you just want your politics straight up without parodies… curse you, because you make me feel like I’m going against my better principals. For you, there’s Kathleen Stewart, whose foray into modern jazz begs us all to “Take back out country.” It doesn’t appear that all of her music is politically charged, but I’ll admit she’s got talent.

Chip and Dale’s Mighty Orchestra

It’s been long enough since I updated. Some people got a laugh out of my last post as I had hoped, some people didn’t. So here’s something that should make everyone smile.

I had this idea some time ago to try and keep my musical skills fit by taking a classic cartoon theme song and making an orchestral rendition of it. That theme song was for “Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers.”

This video has been on Youtube for a short while now and has garnered a handful of hits and positive reviews. I’ve also gotten a request to do another theme song using the orchestra touch. So this could possibly become a new thing for me, doing renditions of classic cartoon theme songs as orchestral renditions. With that said, if you have any ideas for theme songs you’d like to hear done as an orchestra, feel free to leave suggestions in the comments section and I’ll take it into consideration.